Holocaust Memorial Day marked on Auschwitz liberation anniversary

Survivors and world leaders gathered in the bitter chill at Auschwitz on
Wednesday to remember the hundreds of thousands who perished in one of Nazi
Germany's infamous concentration camps, 65 years to the day since troops of
the Red Army liberated the camp.

Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau of Tel Aviv, a holocaust survivor, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, and sirens wailed across the barracks and barbed wire where an estimated 1.1 million people died.

Speaking at the Vatican Pope Benedict XVI recalled "the horror of crimes of unheard-of brutality that were committed in the death camps created by Nazi Germany".

"May the memory of those events, especially the tragedy of the Shoah that has struck the Jewish people, induce respect for the dignity of every person so that all men can perceive themselves as one big family," he said.

In a television address Barack Obama spoke of the "sacred duty to remember the cruelty" of Auschwitz.

For many of the ageing and ever-decreasing band of survivors the passing of the years has failed to diminish the suffering incurred at Auschwitz.

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Marian Turski, prisoner number B-9408, remembered the lice, the humiliation, starvation and the bitter cold of the winter 65 years ago.

"I had secretly made myself a vest, cut from a cement bag," he said. "A guard found it, told me I had stolen German property and beat me terribly." Jadwiga Bogucka, an 84-year-old Pole sent to Auschwitz in August 1944, remembered the day of the camp's liberation.

"It was all covered in snow and it was very cold. There was no gong as usual for breakfast that morning but the previous night there had been the usual terror, or even worse the roll call, the screaming of the SS men," said Mrs Bogucka, who was 19 at the time.

She and the other inmates had found the Germans had fled just hours before the Red Army's 100th Lvov Infantry division came to its gates.